Why do teachers give girls higher marks than boys? Researchers have the answer

> Researchers have the answer

According to the article they don't "have the answer" at all - they have a couple of theories:

> The study's authors say it's possible that, in reading, teachers unconsciously reward students exhibiting traditionally female behaviour, such as quietness and neatness, which make teaching easier for the teachers. Another theory is that inflated grades in mathematics are a way of trying to encourage girls, who are often seen as weaker in this subject.

Anecdotally I had a misandrist/sexist teacher in fourth grade. It was the first grade where they split our maths class. I didn't fail the class, but that teacher rode me extremely hard. She did do other abusive things, like encouraging students to bully each other, and she'd throw an eraser and hit me with a ruler on two separate occasions because she believed I wasn't awake enough. She recommended at the end of the year that I was put in a lower math class and that's where I went. I didn't recover my interests in math until after college. With some irony, she cited my lack of interest in maths as a whole. Two years later I was programming, which up until high school I didn't see how that translated to the maths I learned in school.

I worked as a teacher for a little while. Discount my anecdote if you like, but it always seemed to me that girls are more likely to be grade grubbers than boys.

(For those unfamiliar with the idiom, it means someone who pleads to the teacher to be given a higher grade. I don't know if there's a word in Italian.)

Everyday I think more and more about homeschooling my son and daughter.

In business, you should never outsource your core competency. I wonder if I really should be outsourcing the raising of my kids,that I love most in the world (of course I love my husband too).

I will give you one statistic to get your head going.

I studied theoretical math (long time ago, not in the US). At the university I attended, there were 17 applicants for each admission. My class was 125 people of which about 30 were men and almost a hundred were women.

During first 3 semesters, the class went from 125 to 70 at the end of the first semester, 35 at the end of the second and 20 at the end of third. Out of those 20, 15 graduated in the end, of which 11 were men and only 4 were women.

Now, the rest is subjective view of what happened.

I noticed that most of women that were admitted had really good grades all over (you had to have max points to be even considered) but were not super interested in math. My feeling was that most of girls either did not have a plan at all or their plan was they will be teaching math.

When girls organised, this was either for extracurricular reasons or if it was about math at all, it was to share notes and work together to solve problems that were required by the prof.

And finally when they were learning the material my subjective feeling at the time was that they depended more on rote memorisation. And as everybody knows, theoretical math is worst place possible to be relying on your memory alone.

Most guys on the other hand almost immediately organised into one group of people who actually liked math for math's sake. This might be potentially explained by the fact there was relatively few of us but I don't think this was the only reason.

Now, I cannot speak to how good some of those women were at math and whether they were treated fairly. I was young and I did not pay much attention to it at the time.

But it is interesting to me how much girls were overrepresented in the initial population even if they did not seem to have a strong drive for mathematics -- purely because they had stellar grades and they just could choose any place they could go to.

It is also a bit tragic they got penalised for this choice. I blame the education system which treated math as rote memorisation problem up to this point and never explained to us that this is not mathematics.

Story time, kind of related to the title but you may find it amusing.

I had an older Russian teacher, heavy accent, knew his stuff fairly well, worked for few big Corps. He was teaching data structures. We had this fairly attractive girl in our class, 30 guys and I think 2-3 girls. There was this guy, let's call him "Bob". Bob was sitting next to that girl. That girl has used Bob for most of her homeworks and quizzes. Bob was really into her, it wasn't mutual though. Then, the midterm came. She was in trouble, as she had barely done any work and she had 0 understanding of material. Well, after Bob finished his midterm, they switched papers. Bob changed some variable names, and according to him added a few small mistakes.

2 weeks later Bob got a 'C' and the girl got an 'A'. Bob, loudly said "FUCK" in class and we all were cracking up. Teacher was a bit spooked too, since everyone was whispering about it. Bob stopped talking to her. I think she stopped attending the class. I am honestly not sure if anyone went to the dept. head, as the behavior between the teacher, girl and bob got really awkward.

I hope Bob is doing well, he was nice just a bit naive.

We just had a baby boy and I'm not going to lie, stuff like this has me worried. We were already considering home schooling (we split time between multiple countries and that's not conducive to a normal school schedule) but this is also a good argument for it.

I'd hate for biases in institutional schooling to lead him to hate school and potentially lead to poor life outcomes.

And now that I think about it, there was a massive spread between the grades I was given by teachers and my standardized test results (talking like 30 point difference).

> The study's limitations include using grades which were awarded part-way through the school year.

I think this explains a lot more than they seem to give it credit for. It's already been established in studies that boys will tend to cram for an exam while girls will work steadily throughout the year (hence, why courses that are heavy on coursework favour girls, and those heavy on exams favour boys.)

So it's entirely possible that the girls really were ahead of the boys part-way through the year, and the boys crammed for the exams at the end and overtook the girls.

The original title is misleading, as the paper doesn't answer "why".

> The researchers then looked whether factors, such as the type of school and the size and gender make-up of classes, were driving the gender grade gap.

> They also investigated whether characteristics of teachers themselves, such as how senior or experienced they were and whether they were male or female, helped explain girls' more generous grades.

> Only two factors were found to have an effect—and only in maths. The gender gap in maths grades was greater when classes were bigger. Girls were also graded as being further ahead than boys in technical and academic schools than they were in vocational schools.

> None of the other factors had any significant effect in reducing the gender grading gap.

Just more of the old "women are wonderful" effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect

My friend once told me about a story about his son, who came back home from school, crying, for what reason. My friend, who was obviously shocked, asked his son what had happened. Turns out, he got into an argument with a girl from his class, and that argument escalated, and very much turned into a fight between the two. As expected, sooner or later, a teacher showed up, and broke the fight up. Instead of sending them BOTH to detention, as the teacher should've done, she instead asked the two what had happened. The girl said that the boy hit her first because of his temper, which he didn't, that is, according to my friend's saying. Very peculiarly, the teacher asked no further questions, and sent the boy to ISS. (In School Suspension). The girl went to her next class, and unlike the boy, did not get into trouble with the teachers. The boy had to stay after school as a result of getting into detention. His father, my friend, knew about the incident, as the school had contacted him about it. He was shocked, his little boy had never gotten into detention before, and was ready for his son to come back home to explain himself. That lead up to the events I had talked about in the beginning, where he came back home, crying because of what had happened. Even today, I am still vexed as to why most schools are this way. No student should be able to escape their punishment just because of their gender, and instead, should be taught a lesson, since it'll teach them to learn from their past experience, and improve it based off of what happened.

I think its implicit bias mixed with priming. Teachers - female teachers especially - are primed to view boys as “behavior” over education; girls its the opposite. Because teachers are primed to view boys as more of a behavioral concern, they subconsciously apply that label every time, through every activity.

Clickbaity title, since they don't have the answer and the paper says as much. They do have some guesses, anyone interested just skip the article and go to the conclusions section.

Guess 1 is female student behavior adaptation to what teachers want aside from academic performance:

> School and classroom environments might indeed be adapted to traditionally female behaviours (Lavy 2008). Female students might thus adopt such actual behaviours during class, including precision, order, modesty, and quietness, which go beyond the individuals’ academic performance, but which teachers may highly reward in terms of grades. ... Conversely, teachers may be likely to associate such behaviours only with female students, because girls are traditionally thought of as possessing these traits.

Guess 2 is gender bias over-compensation:

> Another theoretical explanation calls into play teacher overcompensation towards females. Girls are indeed often discussed in discrimination contexts, especially in speeches about gender differences in cognitive ability in dealing with the ‘hard subjects’. A possible explanation for the reason teachers are more generous in grading female students could be that teachers wish to avoid possible discrimination against girls as an ability-stigmatized group. Therefore, teachers may over-assess girls in the same way they sometimes over-assess non-native students, to avoid negative stereotyping (Alesina 2018). From another perspective, it is also possible that the over-assessment of female students’ competences in Mathematics partly represents a sort of ‘push’ to encourage the weaker students (Terrier 2015). As a consequence, this may translate into a positive discrimination which favours girls.

Guess 3 is simply noisy data (teachers using grades to manipulate students into performing better, according to whatever teachers think motivates boys vs. girls):

> A final interpretation of our results could stem from a limitation of our data. Indeed, our measure of student grading is derived from the midterm report card, rather than the final report card of the academic year. Teachers may consciously adopt specific grading practices at the midterm to trigger students’ effort differently according to their gender, to in turn obtain the best possible performance by the end of the academic year. Specifically, teachers could perceive that male students’ effort is more easily triggered by lower grades, which could encourage them to study harder to achieve a better grade, while female students’ effort to achieve higher grades may be more easily triggered via encouragement.

This study seems to ignore the most obvious differences between standardized tests and typical classroom grades. Standardized tests tend to capture a single type of work (getting the right answer, regardless of process) in a single moment (test day) with an objective evaluation (multiple choice). Whereas classroom grades take into account various sorts of work, including process work, over time, and inevitably take into account a variety of skills and performance beyond the “right answer on test day”.

Which is “better”? Impossible to say. Neither captures the whole picture. But the headline and apparent conclusion of the study is misleading at best.

Speculatively, even things as simple as boys being more likely to turn an assignment in late could contribute to results like this. How conceivable is it that this is just the effect of gender-aligned behavior differences?

I like that this article puts the data on the table. I have no idea about what is the exact mechanism for the issue, but as the article notes, girls and boys have slightly different intellects. Furthermore, the eyes-of-the-beholder (teachers) regard them as slightly different creatures as well. And, it wouldn't surprise me if girls in general are nicer to the teachers; while teenager boys feel the pressure to act like he-goats to impress the girls and earn the respect of their peers and adults; and "because kids," their efforts cause the opposite effect in teachers.

Not surprised. I'm living this sexist disrespect and discrimination at Villanova.

Its clear in the comp science program, the profs are under pressure to make girls pass. They get special attention, extra feedback,etc.

Special perks for sure. Its just unfair and demoralizing, but also honestly enraging.

I'd like to see the distributions. Is it a general shift, more pronounced around the pass/fail mark, or at the top?

Handwriting?

Hard life makes monke strong. Will make life hard for small monke to make them strong. Teacher make life hard for small boy monke, that good. Teacher make life easy for small girl monke, bad for small girl monke.

OECD. The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour. (2015). Confidence, PISA, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264229945-en on page 159

> Train teachers to be aware of their own gender biases The report also shows that teachers generally award girls higher marks than boys [for the same exact work], given what would be expected after considering their performance in PISA. This practice is particularly apparent in language-of-instruction courses. Girls’ better marks may reflect the fact that they tend to be “better students” than boys: they tend to do what is required and expected of them, thanks to better self-regulation skills, and they are more driven to excel in school. In addition, girls appear to be stronger in displaying the knowledge they have acquired (i.e. solving an algebraic equation) than in problem solving, the latter of which is a central component of the PISA test. But this report reveals that the gender gap observed in both school marks and PISA scores is not the same in both language-of-instruction classes and mathematics. The fact that it is much wider in the language-of-instruction courses suggests that teachers may harbour conscious or unconscious stereotyped notions about girls’ and boys’ strengths and weaknesses in school subjects, and, through the marks they give, reinforce those notions among their students and their students’ families

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Cappelen, A. W., Falch, R., & Tungodden, B. (2019). The Boy Crisis: Experimental Evidence on the Acceptance of Males Falling Behind. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3348981

Abstract

> The ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale distributive experiment involving more than 5,000 Americans. Our data provide strong evidence of a gender bias against low-performing males, particularly among female participants. A large set of additional treatments establishes that the gender bias reflects statistical fairness discrimination. The study provides novel evidence on the nature of discrimination and on how males falling behind are perceived by society.

From the conclusion

> The emergence of the ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret gender inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale economic experiment conducted with a general population from the United States. The participants act as spectators and distribute earnings between two workers in a controlled labor market environment. When initial earnings are based on merit, we find that the spectators are gender-biased against males. We show that this gender bias is driven by female spectators and we provide evidence suggesting that the underlying mechanism is statistical fairness discrimination, where spectators interpret a male loser as someone who has exerted less effort than a female loser. Our study provides new evidence on the nature of gender discrimination, by showing how the perception of females being disadvantaged may cause people to infer that low-performing males have exerted less effort than low-performing females. […]

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Perspectives in Male Psychology, Louise Liddon & John Barry, page 79, about "Lavy, V. (2008, October). Do gender stereotypes reduce girls’ or boys’ human capital outcomes? Evidence from a natural experiment. Journal of Public Economics, 92(10–11), 2083–2105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2008.02.009":

> An Israeli study of nearly 30,000 pupils in more than 300 schools examined data for three cohorts of Jewish secular high-school seniors in the years 2000-2002 (Lavy, 2004). Student matriculation exams were routinely graded in two ways: an external grade which is blind to name and sex of the pupil, and an internal grade which is non-blind. The pupil's final grade is a mean of the internal and external grades. This study found that boys were given lower grades in the non-blind assessments across all nine subjects studied. The researcher, having ruled out the other possible explanations, concluded the discrepancy in scoring was a result of bias in the unblinded grading. A strength of this study is that it is a natural experiment.

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Terrier, C. (2020, August). Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement. Economics of Education Review, 77, 101981. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2020.101981

> Without teachers’ bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys. [...] Girls’ better behaviour in class is not behind this nudge forwards.

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Di Liberto, A., Casula, L., & Pau, S. (2021, November). Grading practices, gender bias and educational outcomes: evidence from Italy. Education Economics, 30(5), 481–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/09645292.2021.2004999

> We study if the Italian school system suffers from gender bias when judging students. To this aim, we use a differences-in-differences approach that compares the teachers' assessments and the standardized test scores that the students receive during the school year. We have census data for all Italian fifth and sixth graders in two different subjects, math and language, that include a rich set of additional controls. Our evidence reveals that, since primary school, boys are graded less favourably than girls in both math and language. This result is also confirmed for middle school students (sixth graders), and it holds even when (a) we separate the analysis between the most and least developed Italian regions, (b) we control for possible gender-specific attitude towards cheating and teachers' manipulation and (c) we introduce class and school fixed effects in the models. Comparing the results obtained across different levels of schooling and subjects, we cannot clearly identify the role of specific mechanisms in determining the gender bias. Overall the analysis suggests further study on the role of teachers' characteristics.

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Lucas Gortazara, David Martinez de Lafuenteb, AinhoaVega-Bayoc (July 2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2022.103725

> In this paper, we study the presence of systematic differences between teacher non-blind assessments and external blindly graded standardized tests as a measure of grading misalignment. Using a large administrative database covering two student cohorts (N = 31, 183 pupils) from publicly-funded schools in the Basque Country (Spain), we explore the grading gaps found between these two type of assessments for several student characteristics using fixed effects modeling. We find that, after controlling for standardized achievement, systematic teachers’ under-assessment exists for student groups that, on average, lag behind in school: boys, children from an immigrant background, and low SES students. The observed data patterns withstand several robustness checks, including the use of instrumental variables approach (IV) and other alternative regression specifications.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/xx5n...

There is a cliche apparently so far not mentioned:

"Girls pay attention to people and boys, to things."

So, this cliche can be used to explain the Italian results: The girls did better when graded by people because girls are a LOT better working with people, e.g., understanding subtle hints of what the teacher would like, how to please the teacher, and then doing so.

For more, for some years in grade school, girls are ahead of boys in manual dexterity and, thus, in handwriting.

Girls are better than boys in rote memory, language learning and skills, reading, spelling, and some cases of precision in work, e.g., adding columns of numbers.

E.g., by the eighth grade, my handwriting was still just awful. So, given a lot of simple arithmetic to do, my accuracy was awful -- I misread my own writing. The teacher assumed I didn't understand the math. Naw, I understood the math just fine right away -- the reason for my poor accuracy was just my awful handwriting from poor manual dexterity. So, the teacher, with her poor understanding, called me aside and with good intentions warmly, fervently advised me never to take anymore math.

I told Dad, a high end educator, and he laughed. So, I did very well in all the math the school had -- a college prep school, 97% of the students went on to college, deliberately by far the best school in the city. No one beat me on the Math SATs by much! I never took first year calculus -- taught it, applied it, published research in it but never took it -- and started in the second year of calculus. In college I gave weekly lectures to a prof on topology and got "Honors in Math" -- wrote on group representations. My Ph.D. was in pure/applied math. Saw a problem in a class, worked on it for 2 weeks, solved the problem, later published the work.

That 8th grade teacher didn't understand math.

Maybe you have noticed that it is standard for companies greatly to prefer females for positions working with people -- clerks, customer service, human resources, etc. So, managers in companies didn't have to wait for these Italian results and have understood very well quite broadly going way back that women are much better at human facing work -- MUCH better.

The boys/men don't intend to mess up. Instead, they just don't understand people nearly as well and, thus, don't know when they are messing up.

Good for the Italian researchers doing well uncovering part of what has been common wisdom for a very long time!

Ah, Wotan is ripping his guts out over what he has to do to his DAUGHTER

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ojhx-cFsJw